“I can help you,” he said. “Pain is profit—”
“Get the hell out of here!” Aubry screamed.
He stopped, taken aback. And grinned, glancing at his empath meter. “That was good. Maybe twenty credits right there. Would you do that again? A little louder?”
“If. You. Don’t. Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Here. I. Am. Going. To. Kill. You. The Nets would love to buy that. I guarantee you.”
He seemed to be considering it, and then thought again, and shrugged. “Your loss, boss.” And ran, carrying his precious bytes.
Aubry slammed his hand into the wall. He needed clarity, and balance. No one could sell that to him, or buy it for him.
The boy who had once wept over his father’s corpse was gone. Aubry didn’t know that boy anymore. He doubted that he existed. All there was now was a man torn between the worlds of emotion and logic, the physical and the ethereal. Robbed of his past, and denied a future.
A man, nonetheless. A man who would do what he must do for the sake of his family.
And his sanity.
2ND SONG
WIND DANCE
Watch the grass, the clouds,
the rain, if you would know the
wind. Watch the difference
between a man’s words and
his actions, if you would know
the man.
—Ibandi proverb
1
JULY 26
“There are no … guarantees on this sort of operation.” President Harris laid the file down carefully on his desk, brushed the top sheet with the tip of his finger. Harris was a slender, bespectacled man in his mid-sixties, lean but withered by fatigue. His prim, thoughtful mouth was unbalanced by a nose just a fraction too large for the thin face that carried it. Behind the spectacles, his dark eyes were watchful, evaluative. A survivor’s eyes. His carefully tailored brown suit hung on him like a cloak. His large, sensitive hands trembled.
He sighed heavily, and turned to peer out through the louvered window of the Oval Office. It wasn’t really a window: he was completely sealed in here, as every chief executive had been since the assassination of President Quayle. But the vidscreen looked like a window, and piped in full-dimensional images of Pennsylvania Avenue just as if he were an ordinary human being, in an ordinary world.
The world outside seemed so placid, so quiet.
Roland Harris had survived two terms in office. He knew that he had done his duty, and served his country as best he could. There was no more that he could do. For the past few months, some weariness, some emotional cancer within him had grown steadily darker and heavier, as implacable as a colony of rogue cells clusterfucking in his marrow. The time for change had come. The job needed a younger man. At least, it needed a man with younger eyes. One whose mind was a cleaner slate.
When Roland Harris closed his eyes, he saw blood, and rubble. He opened them again, focusing on a man who, despite his diminutive size, had absolutely nothing childlike about him. “I keep remembering that night, General Koskotas.”
“That, sir, is almost inevitable.”
He smelled concrete dust, and the burnt-orange stench of the explosive. “Sterling Delacourte almost killed me, on national television. He could have stolen the country, and God only knows what he would have done with it.”
General Koskotas brushed imaginary dust from his knee. He was always impeccably tailored. His body was always in superb physical condition, posture absolutely erect, whites of his eyes so clear they crackled. Koskotas’s face and body bore only one testament to his six decades of pressure-driven existence: facial lines which suggested that his expression, when unobserved, was one of contempt for everything and everyone in the world.
Harris had never trusted Koskotas, or any of his cohorts in the American intelligence splinter group referred to as STYX. He had learned of STYX almost accidentally, in conjunction with the final debriefing on the Swarna-backed assassination attempt. Too many dollars were flowing in the same direction. During a DEA briefing, he heard that a Nigerian grubfarm made payoffs channeled through Bank of Montreal. Bank of Montreal had been paymaster on a PanAfrican Gorgon raid, six years before. A blackmail sting against a pro-PanAfrica senator involved an ex-military attaché who had served with Koskotas in Ethiopia. STYX again. During that final briefing, Koskotas and Bank of Montreal had been linked to illegal arms sales to PanAfrican rebels.
Harris swore he would blow the operation to Congress unless he was given a full briefing.
STYX was the operation designed to destroy Phillipe Swarna, and to drive a wedge between the Republic and the Japanese. “Make the Japs need us again,” he was told. “We need NipTech, and we’re not getting it. America will fall behind the Common Market. In ten years it’ll be too late to catch up.”
Koskotas cleared his throat. “Knight performed great service, Mr. President. To place him in this kind of risk is … completely unnecessary.”
Harris listened to Koskotas, studied him. Who was this man, behind the medals and ribbons, the honors and degrees? As a hundred times before, he found that he couldn’t penetrate. Try as he might, he got no further than Koskotas’s blue glass-chip eyes.
Koskotas did not see Aubry Knight as a man who had saved a life, even so important a life as the president’s. To Koskotas, Aubry Knight was just another civilian, a wild card, untrustworthy in an operation like STYX.
God. I want to sleep. I want to sleep forever. Harris composed himself. “They say that Harry Truman had a plaque on his desk that read ‘The Buck Stops Here.’”
“I believe that that is true, sir.”
“I never realized one implication of that. It is inevitable that we send good men and women into danger. Some of them die screaming, and probably damn us to Hell for the choices we’ve made.”
“Probably, sir.”
“How do you live with that, General?”
“With what, sir?”
The question was asked placidly, but for just a moment the facade had shifted, and Koskotas’s face was clear to him. And what lay behind it was, simply, death for the enemies of America. At any price. Including Koskotas’s immortal soul.
“With what, sir?”
There was emptiness within this man. Perhaps out of his own loneliness, Harris felt the compulsion to bridge the chasm between them. “Sometimes,” he said, “I dream. I dream about the ceiling of the Democratic National Convention.” Harris stared at the top of his desk as if his predecessor had carved cosmic answers there with the point of a knife. “And there is an explosion. And plaster and steel and wood burst out of the ceiling. And children, Koskotas. The bodies of mutant children. Pieces of bodies. They rain upon me.” His voice was just a whisper now, and he looked gray and worn. It isn’t just that I can’t make love with Juliet anymore. Or laugh, or dance … Something flitted behind his eyes, something sad and dark, like the shadow of a wounded bird or that I drink.
He squared his shoulders and flipped open the dossier. “Aubry Knight. Former employee of the Ortega crime family. He broke away to compete athletically as a zero-gravity combat specialist called a Nullboxer. Ranked number eleven in the world.” Harris paused, shook his head slightly, and then continued. “He was framed for murder, and sentenced to New Quentin and later Death Valley Maximum Security. He escaped during the riots of ’24, and spent years in hiding. Somewhere during that time he took over the identity of one Kevin Warrick, head of the deconstruction group known as the Scavengers. And saved the life of the president of the United States by disrupting a plot by renegade Gorgon commandos.”
“Sir,” Koskotas reminded him. “You’ve done what you could for Knight. You pardoned him …”
“He was innocent.”
“… for escaping. And hardly without stain, sir.”
“And in saving my life, he made an enemy of one of the most powerful men in the world.” He paused, and looked up from the file. “He killed Swarna’s son. I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. His son
was using the name Ibumi, and was the lover and partner of Colonel Quint, head of Gorgon. Knight killed them both.”
Harris’s voice dropped to a whisper. “At what range? What kind of weapons?”
Koskotas cleared his throat. “Unarmed combat, sir. Simultaneously. Sir.”
“Mother of God.” The implications hit Harris in a delayed reaction. He sank back behind his desk, blinking. “How could …” He looked up. “I was always under the impression that the Gorgons were beyond human competition.”
Koskotas colored slightly. “We had the same impression, Mr. President.”
There was silence, except for the sound of the air-conditioning. Then: “I want you to give him his chance.”
“Mr. President.” For the very first time, something like passion crept into Koskotas’s voice. “The … neutralization of a head of state who consistently expects assassination is not an easy thing. Short of an agent resolved to die in the attempt, it can be almost impossible. The American intelligence community discovered that in the nineteen-sixties when they tried to remove Fidel Castro.
“At least three different attempts were made to remove Swarna, including one-armed intrusion under the auspices of an ‘antiterrorist’ action. We simply can’t gamble the established networks on such a long shot. One good man, name of Kolia, has already disappeared.”
“Swarna tried to kill Knight’s family. I owe him my life, General. We owe him his chance.” Harris brushed his right hand across his face, as if wiping away cobwebs. “Tell me honestly. How would you feel about him as raw material?”
Koskotas sighed. “We’ll have a much better evaluation of that after training and testing. Of course, in hand-to-hand combat, his lethality is absolute. Possibly the best in the world. But that won’t count for much against Swarna. Strategy and tactics, weapons skill … these are other things. Facility with vehicles … once again, we don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“We have the records from his training under a man named Guerrero, back when he was with the Ortegas. He is credited with absolute hand-eye coordination. His facility with small arms falls well below what we would expect for an athlete of his caliber. Guerrero postulated that these were conceptual barriers, rather than lack of actual capacity. We do not as yet know what conditions he will face in PanAfrica. He may have to penetrate a fortress called the Citadel. Its security arrangements are somewhat unique. He must be prepared to utilize a wide range of weapons, including pulse rifles, timed explosives, and nanotech.”
“And can you do it?”
“Theoretically, yes. Our task would be to implant the beliefs and mental syntax to use these weapons properly. We would also need to implant a language translator, and utilize a number of deep trance states.” He flipped through the pages of his own report. “There is a possibility that he can handle a direct cortical input. That would be useful, if true.”
Harris’s eyes narrowed. “I thought that was only possible for cyborgs.”
“It should be, yes. Some advanced yoga types can handle it. Reportedly the Medusas could. For most human beings there is simply too much input. Seventy-nine percent of our test subjects suffered cerebral hemorrhage.”
“And you have no idea why he can do this … if he can do it.”
“None.”
Harris sat and folded his fingers together neatly, almost as if in prayer. “I want him to do this, General. I want him to have his chance. If I have any hint that he has less than your full cooperation, I swear I will shut STYX down. Do you understand me?”
Koskotas controlled his anger and changed tactics. “And if you are sending him to die, sir? Are you prepared to deal with that possibility?”
“If he dies …” Harris murmured. My God … how have I done it all this time?
“If he dies, he dies,” Harris said quietly. “But this isn’t a kamikaze operation. I want every effort made to get him out of there alive, do you understand?”
“Of course,” Koskotas said.
But there was no light behind the glass-chip eyes, and Harris knew that the lie had been spoken, the death certificate signed and postdated.
Is this what you want, Aubry Knight? Is this how one repays a … friend? By sending him into death. Oh, God …
Quietly, Koskotas left the room.
2
THE CITADEL, PANAFRICAN REPUBLIC.
Sinichi Tanaka stood just beyond the shadow of Caernarvon, waiting patiently for his primary to complete the kill. The dictator of PanAfrica stood at the edge of the castle’s outer garden, the five hundred meters of man-made Jurassic forest stretching between the moat and the death strip. Beyond that strip lay a thousand-meter no-man’s-land called the Menagerie.
Swarna’s eyes were open, but his mind was out in Menagerie. At the moment he was joined mind and soul to one of the great carnivores, which hunted endlessly in its forest and swamp beyond the palace walls. His eyes stared, vacant, flickering as if in REM sleep, and his mouth made small trembling motions. His fingers crooked into claws.
Not long now.
Tanaka had no moral aversion to virtual addiction. His only concern involved security, regarding the potentially damaging aspects of neural link. To feel full satisfaction during a mating or a kill, ordinary virtual safety precautions had to be abandoned. Ecstasy on so primal a level was … sensation, beyond any ordinary concepts thereof. Addicts had been known to go into shock. To suffer stroke. To exhibit stigmata during the playful, lustful clawing that preceded penetration.
Deep within Caernarvon, that masterpiece of thirteenth-century Edwardian architecture, special safety breakers were constantly monitored. One day, the Americans might attempt to overload Swarna’s nervous system. Sinichi Tanaka had never lost a primary. Nor had his father, or his grandfather, back through six hundred years of service. Tanaka’s people had served Imperial Japan, and then Industrial Japan, and now PanAfrica by way of the Divine Blossom keiretsu.
Tanaka was huge and dusky for a Japanese, with close-cropped black hair and square shoulders, with thick fingers attached to thick palms, terminating in a thick wrist. At one spot, above the left ear, no hair grew, due to a sword slash that had glanced off his skull.
His dark skin was a tribute to his grandmother Grace Tanchala, a half-blooded Zulu who had married a Japanese tradesman. Their child, a mixed breed named Yoshi, had fought and struggled to attend college in Tokyo. A complete outcast, he had achieved academic success, and had, contrary to the wishes of her father, courted and married the daughter of a powerful Yakuza at the time when the Japanese crime lords moved into legitimate business, during the 1980s. Yoshi Tanaka proved so valuable in opening Africa to the Yakuza that he gained a reasonable amount of real power, although excluded from any of the family business.
His son, Sinichi, received an education fit for a samurai—but was never allowed to forget that he could never be such a man. He might know the intricacies of the tea ceremony. He might speak fluent Japanese. He might be a master of iaido and kendo, and hold certificates from the Kodokan and Kyukushinkan. But he was one-eighth black, and even worse, one-eighth white. And for that sin he would be trash, always trash, an animal fit only for service.
But on occasions of state Sinichi Tanaka still carried his great-grandfather’s katana in its original scabbard. He was as muscular as a sumo wrestler on a liquid-protein diet, and held a doctorate in abnormal psychology from Tokyo University. It would have been a grave error to underestimate the man who lived behind those black, empty eyes.
Phillipe Swarna made a growling sound deep in his throat, and his eyes narrowed, and focused on Tanaka. They were reptilian eyes, hot and hungry. As he watched, they softened, they returned to sanity.
“Greetings, Swarna-san,” Tanaka said.
Phillipe Swarna wiped the corner of his mouth, nodded, and turned. “Walk with me,” he said finally. Each step was measured. His brow, once strong, was now grooved with age. His shoulders, once broad and powerful, were now stooped. Tana
ka had seen many men of power, but few on whom the weight rested so heavily.
They paused at the innermost security strip, an invisible electronic curtain. The land without was just as lushly foliated, but Tanaka shuddered slightly. He thought of the creatures that stalked beyond it, and felt a touch of unease.
“You have words for me?” Phillipe Swarna said in perfect Japanese. Swarna’s bodyguards walked four paces behind them.
In their light shock armor and faceplates, Swarna’s bodyguards were dark twins. Both wore the PanAfrican security emblem, an abstraction of Caernarvon, Swarna’s imported prize, symbol of his victory over the Europeans. The Japanese had outbid him for Windsor.
Swarna’s personal guard belonged to no regular regiment. No one outside Caernarvon knew where he had found them. Some rumors said that they came from his home tribe. Others that they were his bastard sons. Sinichi Tanaka was one of the few men alive who knew that they had no names, only the designations Two and Five.
“You called for this meeting, sir,” Tanaka said carefully.
Swarna nodded, but seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. He stopped and bent. A nearby bush rustled. Its triangular leaves looked nibbled along its lower extent. An avocado-sized head, perched on an impossibly long and slender mottled-yellow neck, poked out of the brush. Its body was the size of a medium Labrador. It had squat, powerful legs and a two-foot tail.
The miniature brontosaur peered soulfully up at Swarna and made a crooning sound. Swarna petted it, fished in his pocket, and fed it a nugget of Purina brontochow.
Tanaka marveled. The creature had the brain of a parakeet, but it still responded to Swarna with unmistakable affection. The little creature was collared. The collar was programmed to administer electric shocks. The farther it went from the control fence between the garden and outer Menagerie, the more discomfort it would experience.
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